Russian spies “sleepers” who built public profiles in social networking; Update: “covert” videos added

posted at 9:30 am on June 30, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

The case of the Russian spies seems like such a quaint anachronism that it’s easy to dismiss out of hand. The Associated Press report today on the femme fatale of the ring, a 28-year-old woman using the name Anne Chapman, doesn’t help readers take it much more seriously. The AP has a picture of Chapman from a Russian alumni website with her dressed as a princess, and her rather public profile in the US suggests that she may never have lost that attitude:

Anna Chapman has been called the femme fatale of a spy case with Cold War-style intrigue — a striking redhead and self-styled entrepreneur who dabbled in real estate and mused on her Facebook page, “if you can dream, you can become it.”

Chapman’s American dream, U.S. authorities say, was a ruse.

The 28-year-old Chapman, they say, was a savvy Russian secret agent who worked with a network of other operatives before an FBIundercover agent lured her into an elaborate trap at a coffee shop in lower Manhattan.

Though the U.S. has branded the operatives as living covertly, at least in Chapman’s case, she had taken care to brand herself publicly as a striver of the digital age, passionately embracing online social networking by posting information and images of herself for the world to see.

Prosecutors have charged Chapman and 10 other suspects with following orders by Russian intelligence to become “Americanized” enough to infiltrate “policymaking circles” and feed information back to Moscow.

If Russia’s intelligence agencies think that building a Facebook page is the best way for its agents to remain covert, we have nothing much to fear from this spy ring. Apparently, the FBI agrees. According to this article, the FBI had been tracking the sleepers for years, only arresting them when they attempted to leave the US. Until then, the US was happy to allow them to operate, probably because they had made themselves obvious, and arresting them would only require Russia to replace them with others and force the FBI to track them down.

Interestingly, none of them have been charged with espionage, which would carry severe sentences on conviction. Instead, they’ve been charged with operating as foreign agents without registering, which carries a maximum of five years. If that remains their most serious charge (one man got arrested in Cyprus for money laundering, which carries a potentially longer term), it would seem to indicate that this ring didn’t end up with anything valuable to transmit back to Moscow.

The exposure of Russian spies should not surprise anyone. The Cold War may be 20 years gone, but Russian espionage predated the Cold War. Besides, nations want and need intelligence on their friends and quasi-friends as well as their enemies. Anyone who thinks we don’t have intelligence assets in Russia at this moment is utterly naive. We may even have sleepers in Russia, but if we do, let’s hope that they’re not on the Russian equivalent of MySpace.

Which brings us back to the President’s reaction about the arrests of the Russian agents: “Not happy.” “Not happy” that the FBI is doing its job? “Not happy” that the arrests were made only days after President Obama had an “upbeat meeting” with the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev? Both explanations betray an American President more concerned with the optics of “resetting” U.S.-Russian relations than with the manifold reasons why this relationship has been, and will remain, difficult. …

The bottom line is that Russia is reasserting itself as a reincarnation of its Czarist past—and there is little relationship for the U.S. to “reset” here. The Russians have their interests, we have ours—pretending otherwise won’t change that, other than to encourage the Russians with our weakness, as President Obama did when he made our allies in Poland and the Czech Republic “not happy” by unilaterally canceling the missile defense agreement the U.S. had with them.

T0 be fair, I think that Obama was “not happy” with the espionage, not the arrests. The rest of DeVore’s commentary is spot-on. Be sure to read it all.

Update III: Actually, DeVore is more right than I was on the previous point, as the New York Times reported:

“After years of F.B.I. surveillance, investigators decided to make the arrests last weekend, just after an upbeat visit to President Obama by the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said one administration official. Mr. Obama was not happy about the timing, but investigators feared some of their targets might flee, the official said.”

Breaking on Hot Air

Blowback

Note from Hot Air management: This section is for comments from Hot Air's community of registered readers. Please don't assume that Hot Air management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment just because we let it stand. A reminder: Anyone who fails to comply with our terms of use may lose their posting privilege.

I am puzzled why the Russians even need spies. They have Obama in office who will willingly give all of our power and affluence away. They just need to let him do his work. search4truth on June 30, 2010 at 9:32 AM

If Russia’s intelligence agencies think that building a Facebook page is the best way for its agents to remain covert

The way to remain covert is to blend in, and they were there to sway opinion, which is far more dangerous. If your spies steal the plans for a new airplane, you still have to reverse engineer the thing, if you have Senators in your pocket that will allow the sale of that plane, or prevent it from being built until you can develop a counter measure to it – bigger victory.

I am honestly trying to figure out how they came up with the “spy” thingy. Seriously, these people were in no way shape or form spys. As a general rule of thumb, spys tend to shy away from anything public, and these guys and gals were all over the freaking place making videos and facebook pages. Way to stay covert!

So let’s see. These guys were tasked with influencing US domestic and foreign policy at the highest levels. And…

1. America now has as president a man who counted a member of the US Communist Party as a mentor, who hung around with communists at college, who has appointed admitted Marxists such as Van Jones, and others with Maoist/Communist sympathies, such as Anita Dunn to influential positions in his administration, and counts domestic terrorists Bill ayers and Bernadine Dohrn as frinds

2. That president is driving the US economy into a ditch.

3. That president is at best refusing to confront America’s enemies abroad (Iran, North Korea), and at worse cosying up to them (China, Russia) and enabling them to expand their respective spheres of influence.

4. That president wants to pursue an energy policy that will make the US more dependent on unreliable and potentially hostile foreign providers: specifially, cutting back domestic oil exploration and production while spending billions on ‘green’ alternatives that range from the unproven to the not-even-invented-yet – see also point 2).

5. That president and his administration officials rarely miss an opportunity to downplay notions of ‘American exceptionalism’, and are always ready to blame the US for everything from global warming to racism.

I would think they’ve got the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner out at FIS headquarters.

Using facebook, et al., is not a serious attempt at getting our nuclear & sub technologies, but rather an attempt at seeing how far they, the Russians, can go. Put a few people out there on facebook and writing opinion stories/news articles and just see when the US responds. And it’s not just when/where the US government responds, but how American (& foreign) citizens responds. If the Spanish journalist writes something acceptable to the Western Left, but is in accordance with marxist theory, then that tells you how far to the left the center is.

This was simply a probe at how decadent & weak the West is. Sadly, I think we are very decadent & weak.

Just as true today as it was in 1964. All the best espionage coups for our enemies are NYT these days, and in those days. This ring seems like the Russians had too manys spys and not enough assignements. How many people do you need to subscribe to the NYT and read it after all?

This is silly. They were tasked with infiltrating policy making circles. In order to do that, a great deal of networking would be necessary to make connections with people who have the information they needed. In today’s world, social networking is one of the easiest and most popular ways to go about networking. While they were trying to hide their true identities, they were not trying to “hide” or not be seen in general. In fact, they were trying to do the opposite by making names for themselves. Given all of this, it makes perfect sense that she promoted herself on the internet.

Additionally, while it has been noted that some of the spies were undercover as regular Americans, it does not sound like that was the case with this woman. She seemed to have made it quite clear that she was Russian in public, so the idea that she was “busted” by posting videos of herself speaking Russian on the internet is also silly.

Are you talking about all of them, just expats, or ones who stay in the land of alcoholism and despair?

If you mean the last of the three, that’s like saying women in Florida don’t age well without following it up with “because they spend too much time in the sun, chain-smoking, and snorting an entire bottle of Grey Goose”.

Wow! Do I have to become a commie to join that organization? Because with all those good looking women at that symposium I could probably fake it pretty well. Most professed commies I’ve met were fairly clueless so it wouldn’t be difficult.

being covert doesn’t necessarily mean “being secret.” It can mean being very visible and well-connected, but with the mission being a secret. You’d want someone to be “natural” and what is more natural than a 20-something social networking businessperson in NYC having a Facebook account?